Projects

IN HER HONOR

Pre-Production – Documentary Film

The film examines how ancient ideas can be challenged and changed at the deepest levels of the human psyche. IN HER HONOR tells the stories of three men who committed honor killings–one Muslin, one Hindu, and one Christian. It enters tribal, religious, and family worlds where men are the final authority and killing is defended with the logic, “A man is like a piece of gold, when he is dirtied he can easily be washed clean. But a woman is like silk, when she is dirtied she cannot be cleaned and she must be destroyed.”

TWO SPIRITS

A Film by Lydia Nibley

More information at www.twospirits.org

TWO SPIRITS interweaves the tragic story of a mother’s loss of her son with a revealing look at the largely unknown history of a time when the world wasn’t simply divided into male and female and many Native American cultures held places of honor for people of integrated genders.

Fred Martinez was nádleehí, a male-bodied person with a feminine nature, a special gift according to his ancient Navajo culture. He was one of the youngest hate-crime victims in modern history when he was brutally murdered at sixteen by a young man who bragged to friends that he had “bug-smashed a fag.” Two Spirits explores the life and death of a boy who was also a girl and the essentially spiritual nature of gender and sexuality. The film makes the case that in the twenty-first century we need to return to traditional values.

STORY CIRCUS

Story Circus is a hip, inventive, animated and live action series made up of an eclectic group of stories gathered under one big tent. The series is being developed by Riding The Tiger Productions in collaboration with an exceptional group of writers, animators, actors, and musicians—some of whom have kids and are itching to create for them, and others who just want to run off and join the storytelling circus.

RISE

An original pilot for a television series written by Lydia Nibley and Russell Martin

A rule‐breaking doctor, who has recently moved to Rise, Arizona with her new husband and two teenage daughters, discovers that the experimental medication she is prescribing to her patients surprisingly lifts their libidos, their spirits, and their passion for life—and that when it comes to better living through chemistry things are never as simple as they may seem.

What if a drug tested by a pharmaceutical company as medically “legitimate” also affected the body, mind, and spirit in a combination of ways not everyone is comfortable with—stimulating libido, increasing empathy and feelings of love, and alleviating fear? Would the FDA sanction it? Would the DEA stay away from it? Would society approve of it? And would it make life better, worse, or just more maddeningly complicated?

IT’S COMPLICATED

A radio piece by Lydia Nibley broadcast internationally by the BBC

The story begins in front of Picasso’s great painting Guernica on September 11, 2001, and continues on a journey to the town of Gernika in Basque country in northern Spain, a town destroyed during the Spanish Civil War by a new kind of warfare, a strike from the sky against a symbolic target, with many innocent people dead as a means of terrorizing the civilian population.

When I asked the young Basque woman acting as my interpreter about current ETA terrorism, she offered comments sympathetic to their cause, repeating the phrase, “It’s complicated,” as if to assure me that if I understood more, I would see their violent acts as entirely justified. Masses for the dead in the U.S. were being said throughout Europe in the days after September 11th, and the piece uses ambient sound collected in public places and in churches to approach the subject of how complicated these events are both in the moment and historically.

Picasso said, “War’s end. Hostilities go on forever.” But in this story we find there is also an equal and enduring kinship shared by those who have suffered the violence that comes to the innocent. The ideologies and politics that perpetrate violence are sometimes forgotten and forgiven, and a deep connection links those who have survived terror—and their compassion for each other is enduring.